Le Forte Four
Le Forte Four were the earliest group in the collective of avant-garde music anarchists known as the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS). With their music combining loose experimental improvisation on both conventional instruments and household items with stuff taped off television cartoons or taken from records as well as lo-fi electronics, Le Forte Four were pioneers of sampling, even as their D.I.Y. ethic paved the way for the punk movement a few years later.
Le Forte Four were the earliest group in the collective of avant-garde music anarchists known as the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS). With their music combining loose experimental improvisation on both conventional instruments and household items with stuff taped off television cartoons or taken from records as well as lo-fi electronics, Le Forte Four were pioneers of sampling, even as their D.I.Y. ethic paved the way for the punk movement a few years later.
Member of: LAFMS - Los Angeles Free Music Society
Blorp Esette Gazette Volumes Three & Four
The history of the Blorp Esette, which chronicles the output of the Los Angeles Free Music Society and other entities in its orbit, dates back to 1977, with the release of Blorp Esette Volume One LP (soon to be reissued by Superior Viaduct) and Volume 2 2LP in 1980. Volumes 3 and 4 emerged in 1999, packaged in a boxset with the previous volumes. The Blorp Esette Gazette first appeared with Volume 1 & 2 in 2013. Intended to be an on-going series, it was paused after the passing of Transparency la…
Infringements / 35 S. Raymond Avenue
This bundle includes the following:Smegma "Infringements" (LP) **Edition of 230** This is alga marghen’s third installment of Smegma’s original “Suburban Primitive Avant-folk music” Period (1973-1975) based in Pasadena, featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the deep vault of their home recordings. In the beginning, the Band Smegma had only one rule. No Musicians.
Starting from scratch, they took the Road much less traveled. They were inspired by outsider musical artists of the time s…
35 S. Raymond Avenue
**New edition of 100 numbered copies presented in a hand-coloured sleeve** One afternoon in 1975, friend and fellow music traveler, Harold Schroeder, showed up at Poo-Bah Record Shop where Tom Recchion worked selling records and experimental music to people, forcing them to buy albums that he swore would change their lives. Harold asked if Tom wanted to share in a studio space close to the shop. After seeing it Tom immediately said "YES!". They moved in and divided the space in half. On Tom's ha…
États-Unis Bundle III
Includes five albums: etat16 - Various - I.D. Art #2 (LP) etat17 - Le Forte Four / Doo-Dooettes - Live at the Brand (2xLP) etat18 - Various - Blorp Esette Volume One (LP) etat19 - Smegma - Glamour Girl 1941 (LP) etat20 - Various - Sound (LP)
Blorp Esette Volume One
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
Live at the Brand
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
I.D. Art #2
Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) formed in the mid-1970s as a loose-knit experimental music collective and multimedia publishing vehicle. Founded by teenage Le Forte Four members Chip Chapman, Joe Potts and Rick Potts and soon joined by Tom Recchion of Doo-Dooettes, LAFMS incorporated free improvisation, modular synthesizers, tape music, sampling, musique concrète, homemade instruments, noise, mail art and avant-rock in permissive and anarchic sessions at the Raymond Building and Poo-Bah R…
Los Angeles Free Music Society -1974~1983+
Building on the back of a pretty stunning series of releases over the last year and beyond, Vinyl on Demand returns with one of their most ambitious outings yet, Los Angeles Free Music Society's "-1974~1983+", a stunning, deluxe 13LP box set - issued in a limited edition of 500 copies - of early material that has never before been issued on vinyl, from one of the most important outfits in underground, experimental music from the American west.
Bikini Tennis Shoes
*totally sold-out at source, few copies back in stock* The origins of Le Forte Four are those of the Los Angeles Free Music Society itself. Chip Chapman joined forces with Rick Potts (and shortly thereafter Tom and Joe Potts), taking up the LAFMS name in 1974. Ultimately baptizing themselves Le Forte Four, they began threading imagined lines between John Cage and The Residents, Cecil Taylor and Henry Cow – generating sounds completely unlike any of these and anything since. The inaugural release…
LAFMS Box Box
Bringing together over seven hours of absurd, elusive and often disturbing music, The Box label finally unveil this epic, years-in-the-making 13x LP Box Set from Lafms, a must for those of you familiar with their work or, indeed, the colourful dreamscapes so often associated with.LAFMS BOX BOX documents every performance from the exhibition Beneath the Valley of the Lowest Form of Music - The Los Angeles Free Music Society 1972-2012 at The Box, Los Angeles in 2012. The Los Angeles Free Music So…
Second Life: Light Bulb 1977-81
As part of our Second Life series, we are pleased to present a special anthology of Light Bulbmagazine (1977–81), produced in cooperation with the Los Angeles Free Music Society and edited by LAFMS founding member Chip Chapman. Light Bulb was the house organ of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, made by and for the experimental collective of musicians that formed in 1972 Pasadena and soon "became a lightning rod for art-damaged, weird-music lovers everywhere." Nowhere is the DIY, visual complex…
Hallucinatory Huareches
Edition of 180 copies. Reissue of the Slowscan cassette from 1985. Recorded December 1984. Engineered by Rick Potts & Joseph Hammer. Le Forte Four (Rick Potts, Joe Potts, Tom Potts, Susan Chapman & Chip Chapman) were the original line-up of the Los Angeles Free Music Society or LAFMS. While they were working on their first album ‘Bikini Tennis Shoes’, they changed their name from LAFMS into ‘Le Forte Four’ and used the name LAFMS for the label on which they released that album in 1975. All…
Blorp Esette
2011 remastered edition. Remastered in June of 2011 by Ju Suk Reet Meate. Perhaps the only logical follow up to the historic LAFMS: The Lowest Form Of Music 10CD box on RRR, is this 4CD compilation based around the 2 LP volumes of Blorp Esette which Ace Farren Ford released under the LAFMS umbrella in 1978 (Vol. 1) and 1980 (Vol. 2, a double LP set). Both of the LPs featured cover & label art by Don Van Vliet which as been reproduced on this CD reissue. Capt. Beefheart cover art was quite a c…
Unboxed
Unboxed, a collection of dissected from the Lowest Form of Life 10CD box set (on RRR) (including tracks not available in the box set) is a splash introduction to a newcomer of the L.A.F.M.S. The Lowest Form of Music is an utterly devastating set of the works of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. This tremendously obscure collective -- a loose assemblage of artists and with shared subversive musical interests (John Cage, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, The Residents, Derek B…
Boris The Spider/Priceless
This edit of Le-Forte Four is wedged between their former incarnation as The Patients and their debut LP that was put together in the electronic music studio at Cal Arts in 1974. Edited by Rick Potts in 1973. All the references made in their debut Bikini Tennis Shoes LP, from Speed Racer to Zappa to Looneytoons to the Moog, is very clearly foretold in the 'Boris The Spider/Priceless' edit. Includes Extended Grunge and Arguments From The Patients reworking of The Who's 'Boris The Spider' that was…
The Lowest Form Of Music
Long out of print huge box, The Los Angeles Free Music Society was a complete screwball fringe music collective that peaked in the true heart of darkness -- America in the mid 70s. They self-released LPs, 7"s and cassettes in the dawn before real independent distribution and the myth that surrounds those sacred pressings has in recent years become feverish. Mixing pure sonic weirdness, musique concrete, free improv blare, fringe-noise-nonsense and much more, the musicians involved with LAFMS cre…